The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive?
Read MoreThe Political Bubble
Political thinkers are deeply divided about whether people are inside the bubble in that their political thoughts and actions are anchored in their actual social life or else that politics take place as a result of what is outside the bubble, politics a circling cyclorama of people and ideas churned out by policies, doctrines, and people who live in the reality of the media. This division does not line up with Conservatives and Liberals. DeTocqueville was a Conservative who thought that politics was grounded in the town hall democracy whereby local citizens learned to compromise with one another so as to get a local road created so that they could bring their produce to market. Marxists, for their part, thought that people were grounded by the actual conditions of their labor. Lazarsfeld political polling was based on the idea that voters were grounded in the demographics of their situation. Republicans were grounded in small town bourgeois life and Democrats were grounded in their working class situations rather than the working class allegiances that were derived from their situations. Thinkers of those who opposed these views took the idea that politics took place on the outside of their lives. Machaevelli’s view was that people in power had to instill both fear and love so as to get people to accept power and so that meant that these feelings were engendered by the people in power, on their balconies and through their marches, rather than by intruding with very many people so as to create and sustain order. Most politics is the theatre of politics. Ortega Y Gasset thought that the mass of people were dissociated from their structural ties so that they could roam around and riot as they will, their political activities independent of their allegiances or interests. Lord Bryce, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, thought that public opinion had come to dominate Democratic societies in that whatever were the popular views of the moment, the fads and catchphrases of the people, would motivate people to use their vote to get their way and effectuate policies. Closer to home, people are understood as responding to Donald Trump because they find him somehow attractive and compelling, and so are responding to the outside of the bubble, even if their own conditions are not so bad, or else must be responding from grievances, whether economic or cultural, as the reasons for why they get up off the coach to become engaged with Trumpian politics.
Read MoreInsurrection
Today is Friday and it was just two days ago that Donald Trump encouraged people to invade the halls of Congress. Joe Biden said while the onslaught of Congress was taking place that a President’s words mattered for good or for ill and so he asked President Trump to tell the rioters in Congress to cease their activities. Some hours later, Trump said that they should go home even though he loved those people who were engaged in the violence, which was clearly a half-hearted condemnation of violence. The intruders did not achieve their objective to delay very long the certification of the Electoral College vote because the Congress reconvened and met through the night to finish the task. Joe Biden, who is not an eloquent man, did offer a word that had resonance during his remarks. He said that what happened in Congress was an “insurrection”. (Sen. Mitt Romney used the same term, as did Sen. Chuck Schumer, in very short order, and the term has now been used by many others.) The events at the Capital were not just a riot or a disturbance, but an insurrection, and we should think what that term means.
Read MoreObama's Victory Lap
Early reviewer’s of Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land”, his memoir of the first two years of his Presidency, found the book to be candid because Obama mused on his uncertainties about his personal and political decisions. Actually, Obama is not at all forthright in this book. He plays it very close to the vest, a kind of victory lap where he thanks all the people that helped him on his ascent to the Presidency and never clearly says what was his motivation to drive towards the Presidency. He acts as if it happened to him, arriving at the point that his speech at Kerry’s nomination in 2004 that gave him an opportunity to be in the spotlight and for people to see him as having a voice, and then coming to understand that the United States Senate was too narrow a place in which to enact public policy, and then finally deciding to run so that some little Black boy would see that he could emulate Obama. That rings false in that Obama seems to have had political ambitions from the start, he an up-and-comer in the Illinois Senate, just waiting to make his move. His greatest candor is his life long apology for how politics had made Michelle's life more difficult, as if becoming President were not a worthwhile achievement and as if she could not have known early on that he was ambitious. Harry Truman was not ambitious, but Obama certainly was. Why else had he insisted on being only a part time professor of the University of Chicago Law School? Obama, in his memoir, does not explain himself.
Read MoreEntitlements
Liberals, who believe in the intervention of government to right wrongs and to regulate the economy and the social structure, are identified with FDR’s New Deal, but FDR used a variety of mechanisms other than entitlements to achieve its ends of providing work and greater equality between peoples, the regime of entitlements meaning that legislation would consist of financial and other services and preferences to be awarded to categories of eligibility. The first acts in FDR’s First Hundred Days were not entitlements. The Glass Steagall Banking Act of 1933 provided for the separation of commercial from investment banking. It required commercial banks to have sufficient equity and provided the FDIC to guarantee that bank customers did not have to worry about runs on the banks. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, also early on in 1933, allowed for the government to buy up beef and pork so as to destroy them so as to keep up farm prices. It also allowed farmers to get money so that they would refrain from raising crops, and so also raise farm prices, even though this was sort of an entitlement because people who owned farms were paid for a purpose, the purpose more important than the mechanism. The Wagner Act of 1935 set up a mechanism whereby workers could engage in collective bargaining rather than pay or guarantee wages to union workers. The TVA put in a lot of money to build dams and create electrical grids rather than give grants to people in Tennessee. The CCC made work available to poor whites rather than give them food stamps or a dole. Yes, entitlements did come later. Social Security, passed in 1935, was a clear entitlement in that a category of people--the aged-- were entitled to get benefits when they had reached a certain age and had contributed to payroll taxes for by then just a very short time of payment. And the great last act of the New Deal, the Wages and Hours Act of 1938, did require people of occupational categories to meet pay and work standards, though not by direct payments. Nor were entitlements the only mechanisms for reform during the War on Poverty. Money was used by Lyndon Johnson to create incremental change in a variety of outcomes, such as better nutrition or availability to education, by paying programs rather than people, though some entitlements were included, as was the case with Medicare and Medicaid, so as to entitle people to the cost of health care because they qualified as old or poor.
Decades and Trends
Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.
Read MoreThe Nature of Evil
Trump is “unquestionably” evil, Marty has said for years now, because Trump separated immigrant children from their parents. Harold, Marty’s son, responded, “You still holding on to that?” Harold’s meaning, according to Roland, is that Trump’s action of separating parents from children has been forgotten by everyone, held onto only by extremists like Marty. Extremist reasoning is inherently dismissable.
Read MoreOrganizational Portals
There was a science fiction movie which showed people as having multiple portals on their bodies to which were attached hoses, perhaps half a dozen to a person, which swung free and were available to be connected to machines that took or received some fluids. It was very unnerving to see people so dependent on their mechanical devices that made them able to survive though, if you think about it, this was a biological metaphor in that people do have tubes that sustain life. Food goes down your gullet and wastes come out of tubes whose exit points are covered. It was just unsettling to see these processes as mechanical rather than biological. There are, however, another set of portals that, as the expression goes, connect every person to their lives. These are the organizational portals whereby you are connected to your identity and therefore have access to the services which sustain us, both biologically and otherwise. I have become particularly aware of my reconnecting to my new portals when I recently moved from New York to Salt Lake City. I did not have to change my phone number because of the miracle of a cell phone, but I did have to change addresses for my credit cards and my health insurance companies and I still keep my passport handy to identify who I am. All those verifications of my identity enable me to live an ordinary life. I don’t need one for a supermarket, but Utah requires an identification so as to access a liquor store, which was not the case in New York.
Read MoreTrump in Anguish
If I were a playwright rather than a critic, I would write a play, "The Anguish of Trump", that told a tragedy in the style of Camus' "Caligula". It would show his despair and anger at having lost the presidency, much worse than previous incumbents who have lost and can solace themselves for what were their accomplishments, such as Popi having waged the Persian Gulf War, which he believed was a good thing. Even Herbert Hoover was rehabilitated in that he produced a major set of recommendations about the future of government and policy after FDR eventually left office, and Nixon, unsuccessfully, tried to rehabilitate himself. But Trump can't rest on his laurels because he never cared for them and so is simply a loser, the ultimate loser, bereft of any honor and without any graciousness. He had said nothing for five days after Election Day and presumably just fumed, and then he lashed out with accusations of fraud, none of which supplied with evidence, even his lawyers admitting there had been no fraud, and then blaming anyone he could care to for his defeat, including the claim that the pharmaceutical companies developing the coronavirus vaccines had deliberately delayed the process so that the Democrats could win the election. Trump's measures were thwarted by the permanent civil service, who supervised their ballot counting, and by judges who Republican appointed judges decided that there were no merits to keeping the voting certified. It is worth adding that certification by the states had not been previously more than paperwork, the election decided by whatever unofficial result was offered by the AP or even back to the time when the trusted Walter Cronkite declared an election decided. So we go through the legal process with utmost punctiliousness and Trump comes short. Trump stews, as is the just result of his nature, perfectly appropriate in a tragedy that tells what it is to be a person without values and so left to drift or to be battered by events, him being without a compass whereby he might right himself, and so the subject of a very Camus like theme.
Read MoreEssential and Consequential Aspects of the Civil War
David M. Potter, in his well regarded and still quite valuable history, “The Impending Crisis”, published in 1976, says that at the time of the Mexican War the various aspects of American structure and culture were remarkably uniform in that they intersected and functionally supported their regional economies, shared the values that had supported the Revolution, and were homogeneous in that they were mostly of English speaking peoples, all with the exception of what had happened to the slaves. Potter makes this point so as to say the road to disunion was created after the Mexican War, and so could perhaps become unnecessary if other political and structural things had happened. That is very different from saying that the Civil War had been inevitable in the sense that what happened in the intervening years, or even back to the arrival of slavery in 1619, had been compromises to try to avoid the inevitable outcome of civil war, whether they were due to the arrangements in the Constitution that allowed slaves to be counted as three fifths the number for the calculation of state representation, or because of the three compromises composed by Henry Clay that allowed the Union to persist from 1831, the time of the Missouri Compromise, where north of that state the territories would be free states, to 1861, never finding a long term solution to the dilemma of slavery. The view today is very different from what it was in Potter’s time. Nowadays, people speak of slavery as having been the original sin from which we have not as yet staunched its wounds, there needing to be a great reckoning of what was unfolded in the past. No justice; no peace. I want to address this highly toxic issue through carefully addressing the words that people deploy in engaging this discussion.
Read MoreJubilation
Jubilation for Biden is never what I expected weeks ago much less in the past few days as Biden expects to slowly and confidently move towards a Biden very close victory. Actually, my response to the election before hand and now is relief rather than elation. There were so many things that might have gone very wrong: massive irregularities, mischievous lawsuits, violence sufficiently anticipated so that Washington and New York City have boarded up buildings. But local elections did their jobs by methodically and calmly keeping to the election system, showing that the American people, despite these four years, are a people with a genius for government, just as the British had done in the Nineteenth Century and before and after. There is something to be said for the Electoral College making the legitimate choice certain and soon and for letting local districts control their precincts by administering calm and peaceful and even handed voting. I saw Ohio being orderly even though the voting is split just about the middle.
Read MoreThe Chicago 7
I just caught up with the Andrew Sorkin movie about the Chicago 7 showing the anti-Vietnam activists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 being prosecuted in federal court during the following year for having incited rioting. Sorkin did a good job making the plot coherent and showing the different points of view and Sorkin, as usual, punched up some telling lines, but I felt that the whole enterprise was wrongly focussed. The trial was just an anticlimax after the events that had happened in the previous year, the images of the actual riots much more profound than a trial that was so clearly a show trial that not even the prosecution didn’t want to pursue it and a judge so biased that there was no doubt about who was the bad guy. No contest on the issue of free speech versus authoritarianism. Sorkin tried to create some controversy by comparing Tom Haydn as the one who said that all the programs depend on what happens to the vote in opposition to Abbie Hoffman saying that the demonstrations were creating a cultural revolution. So the movie had a dramatic clash between the two ideologies: Haydn as a traditional political organizer and Hoffman as crafting a new way to do politics. But that wasn’t the larger issue. Sorkin showed Haydn, at the end of the movie, reading off the numbers of people who had been killed in Vietnam during the time of the Chicago 7 trial. That was what the war was about: its carnage and the attempt to stop that. That was the view all the characters in the film portrayed as the gravamen of the war. David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7, had indeed been a conscientious objector on the grounds of being a Pacifist. Joan Baez, a fellow traveller of that time, said she was a Pacifist because she was against violence, though she demurred that non-violent resistance against Hitler would have had many casualties before the German people had blanched at the number of deaths.
Read MoreThe Last Presidential Debate of 2020
What could possibly happen in the last 2020 Presidential Debate, I wondered? Everything seemed to be set and done. That first debate was informative rather than chaotic because each of the performers did what each of them did: Trump a blowhard who says the venomous things he has extolled ever since he went down the Trump Tower escalator and Joe Bidden righteous in his principles and agenda even if he sometime has garbled his words, a viewer difficult to say that his childhood stuttering is worse than it has been for many years even though his voice does seem weaker. Each of the two characters are very familiar. There are few secrets of character to a presidential candidate. They are what they are at least as I have known them back to Harry Truman. Moreover, the voters have pretty much made up their minds, weeks ago ninety percent of them saying they wouldn’t change their minds. The polls have been stable in that the battleground states are mostly pro-Biden and Joni Ernst is a little bit behind in the Iowa Senatorial race by just a few points and Susan Collins is consistently behind in Maine by five points. Biden has for months had a constant nine or ten percent lead. Might as well vote and finish it, unless there is a late October Surprise, the canard against Hunter Biden having fizzled-- unless something comes up tonight. Also, voter irregularity is not likely to make a difference. Georgia and Texas are not likely to turn Democratic even though Gov. Abbott has run scared enough to insist on the scandalous behavior of restricting the number of places to deposit ballots so that there is only one of them in Harris County, which covers four million people in that it includes Houston. I thought that the vote meant that the access to the vote was supposed to be made available as part of the right to vote, but not so for some Republicans. So there is nothing left but the nail biting because the voters are mercurial rather than firmly implanted in their demographics. We will see what we can see.
Read Morethe Heartland
My family and I visited Promentary Point where my fourth grade history told me that it was the place that the last spike was placed in1869 to connect the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific and so create a continental railroad. It was quite an accomplishment, indicated, as we drove past, by how long were the graded stone bedways so that the train would not have to rise or fall too quickly as well as all those ties and rails. A marker at the exhibit showed that the information of the event was sent by telegraph to Omaha and points East, including President Grant in Washington, D.C. I was also impressed by the arid land. It was desolate and windy and with vast vistas. Not a task without hardy people and careful planning. I also remembered in the fourth grade, where I seem to have learned a lot of things, the quick development of communications. The Pony Express had lasted for eighteen months so people could travel in 1860 and 1861 from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento. The continental telegraph system, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., was completed in 1861 in Salt Lake City and the pinnacle of these three amazing developments in the Eighteen Sixties was the continental railway itself, which I have heard was not significantly interfered with by the Indians because by that time the Indians in the area were largely pacified.
Read MoreThe Truth of Conversation
When I was a child and went to visit relatives with my parents, I thought how fortunate I was to be a child because I could go off to play in my room of my relative’s child and use his toys as well as the ones I had brought with me while the adults spent their time in the living room just talking. That had to wait until I was slightly older when I would sit on the stoop outside my apartment building and go over with friends what we had seen on television or what we knew about girls. It is worth pondering conversation as being an essential human activity, something we very much recognize during the pandemic in that people crave to be with people to flirt and drink and talk with one another, even if doing so can incur fatal risks. We have to be free to talk. There are many explanations for this. Talking allows people to convey information and to also hector and intimidate one another and also to display relative social prestige. Putting these and other functional advantages of talk aside, one of the most miraculous and existential qualities of talk is that it is unalienated, which means that people are likely to tell the truth of what they are when they converse with one another. It isn’t just that people will unload when in stress and so unload the truth. Rather, it is that in the ordinary course of events that we say what is the truth and that we have only with great difficulty do we manage to confide the truth or avoid blaring out what is in our mind. Yes, there are turns of phrases that distract and there are exaggerations and circumlocutions. But people are, in general, like dogs in that they are also not inclined to lie. A dog gives over that he is trying to lie. He will act submissively when the bad thing he has done, such as poop on the rug, will soon be revealed. No dog is an accomplished liar, and the same is with people.
Read MoreHow Black Lives Can Matter
The past three weeks have moved quickly because there have been rapid and very different shifts of public attention. First, there was Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” which showed that Trump had lied by denying just how bad the coronavirus would be, he said, not so as to create panic, as if the only alternative to avoid panic is to lie. But as is the case with many of Trump’s outrages, people just move on, as when he said he would not accept the election if he lost, other Republican politicians pooh-poohing the matter, the succession to be intact as it has been since 1792. Republicans treat Trump much less seriously than Democrats do. Then there was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, someone whom I much admired though I thought the accolades were a bit much, praise heaping over praise, perhaps because she is a model of probity as that is every moment implicitly contrasted to the current President. And then returned the public to an incident that awakens the issue of Blacks being unfairly killed by the police. There were no charges for the killing of Breonna Taylor, which led to public outrage and to the MSNBC regulars, who are sure that there should have been high criminal charges for the Louisville police officers. I am going to say something controversial about this last particular matter, even though it may give many people offense, that being the coin of the common realm. People are more concerned about whether they are rankled is more important than whether people are accurate or analytic, so deeply are deeply incurred to the solipsistic cliches of our times. Look carefully at the ways the choices of words spin the issues.
Read MoreTrump and Other Verbal Confusions
I am continually astonished that Donald Trump supporters do not diminish their enthusiasm for him no matter how outrageous he says things. You might think that treating military deaths as “suckers” and “losers” would give people pause. Even if reports of this are regarded as lies, Trump did say on the record that McCain that he was not a hero because he had been captured would seem to patriotic citizens to regard as an affront. But I heard one Trump supporter say that the antagonism between Trump and McCain was just politics and so just dismissed the matter, as if politicians say and do just anything and so are to be discounted, though for some reason what is said or attributed about Clinton or Biden will not be discounted. So there is an attempt to make sense of whatever is the point of view of the Trump supporters, even though they are not, as a matter of fact, socially or economically disadvantaged, nor because they are poorly educated, in that since the uneducated clearly enough supported FDR because they clearly enough saw what was in their interests. The Trump supporters remain a puzzlement. Are they angry for no reason? Are they disturbed at the way society is changing? Part of the explanation, I suggest, for Trump supporters are partly the verbal confusions that occur in political discourse so as to evade or obfuscate issues. Verbal ju-jitsu allows people to support them for whatever other are the real reasons of a preference, whether that is racism or Covid denial or whatever other are the Trump concerns.The verbal gymnastics are longstanding and are currently on parade. But they also have to do with the particular kind of rhetoric in which Trump is involved, ways in which he cannot help himself, and that help along his obfuscations and so have made quite an appeal for him for five years now. I will try to parse out some of his peculiar verbal constructions.
Read MoreBiden's First Hundred Days Or So
The Biden and Harris campaign is excoriating Trump as a sleaszy, racist, mean spirited person who has also been derelict in his duty in that the President has neither a plan to deal with the coronavirus pandemic or to deal with the continuing economic crisis. It is more than understandable that there would be a focus on this singular figure. Just about everything that might go bad has gone bad. We should be thankful that there is no major war. The focus groups may also conclude that the demeaning of Trump is likely to earn a few points in Biden learners and with those who are disenchanted with the President. That campaign decision is not to spend much time or attention on the plans Biden will roll out when he might become elected, even though the general wisdom is that elections are about hope and promises for the future rather than failures of the past. We will see. But interviews with Biden and Harris have made clear that there is a clear program of action should Biden become President, and so we are sometimes not emphasizing enough what Biden will do on Day 0ne. I want to cobble together what is said or implied about what his plan is, even if Biden does not want to make his plan front and center.
Read MoreThe Routine Republican Convention
David Brooks said on Friday that the talking points of the Republican Convention were incoherent. That is just incorrect, perhaps because Brooks preferred to believe Republicans had a sweeter tone in years past. But even on the first night, the talking points were neither new nor particularly biting than the accusations leveled against the Democrats ever since I started watching both Republican and Democratic Conventions ever since 1952. It has always been the penchant of Republicans to attack Democrats as Socialists or worse. They were also the exponents of Main Street and then of the suburbs. Republicans and Trump are against the labor unions and in favor of the corporate job creators. Republicans and Trump emphasize the danger of public rioting and urban unrest lest it reach to social anarchy. Republicans and Trump are bellicose about foreign nations, such as Cuba and the Soviet Union then, or, now, Venezuela and China and Iran. The great dirty secret is not that Trump took over the Republican Party, but that the Republican Party, however much its misgivings about his verbal excesses, is comfortable with most of his policy positions, to the extent that Trump can say he has a set of positions rather than a reflexive instinct for the most Conserrvative caricatures of American society. Henry Kissinger once said that the Republican Party was a first rate party with a second class constituency. He was probably thinking of the able cabinets Republican Presidents assembled once they got elected. That is no longer the case. The party is just its constituency.
Read MoreThe Dull Democratic Convention
The Democratic Convention that ended on Thursday with Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, was a dull affair. That wasn’t just because there was no live hoopla on a convention floor. It was also that the convention organizers had failed to find a visual equivalent to that by creating fanciful settings in which to set the speeches. They did have a moment when you saw the states nominate Joe Biden with their landscapes in the background, so New Mexico looked like itself, as did American Samoa. But they needed the sort of people who design the opening night spectacles at the Olympics to choreograph some pageantry for an event that looked, instead, like something out of the early days of television. You might have thought that would be unnecessary given the gravity of the issues facing the nation, and these were indeed alluded to. Barack Obama took on Trump’s character, as well he could and might, but he did not spell out why the man is unfit for office. Why was he pulling his punches? Do the polls tell the Democrats not to go after Trump personally? Various speechifiers did lambast Trump on the issues that I, for one, think important. Trump had separated toddlers from their parents and made it hard for them to be reunited. He had not criticized Putin for putting a bounty on the lives of American troops. Unmentioned, however, was Trump’s on again and off again negotiations with the Chinese that had left farmers in the lurch. The speeches tended to be flat, more like a telethon, as one wag had it, which means for me that the speeches all said the same thing, which is that we would be spiritually better off if we give money to and, in this case, vote for a good cause, one that will bring us all together. Jerry Lewis did it better.
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